The Chief Liturgical Book of God’s People
For at least two millennia the biblical Psalter has been the chief liturgical book of God’s people. The Psalms uniquely reflect the full range of human experience and reveal to us God’s word. In them we hear expressions of joy and lament, cries for revenge against enemies, confession of sin, acknowledgment of utter dependence on God, recitations of his mighty acts in history, and finally songs of praise and adoration. Many of the psalms are ascribed to David himself, and there is even a tradition making him the author of the entirety of the book. While there is no certainty to the ascriptions traditionally prefacing each psalm, it is likely that many of them do indeed originate with the revered founder of the Judaic dynasty. If the latest of the psalms were composed during the Persian and perhaps even into the Hasmonean eras, then the Psalter was compiled over the better part of a millennium of Jewish history before being finalized sometime during the second temple period. Translated into Greek as part of the Septuagint, the Psalms naturally found their way into early Christian usage as well.
The New Testament writers see in several of the psalms, for example Psalms 2, 8, 22, 41, 69, 110, and 118, a foretaste of the coming Messiah. The early church fathers added to this number, seeing Jesus Christ not only in several other individual psalms but also in the whole of the Psalter itself. Thus the psalms of lament came to be seen as describing not merely the miseries of the human authors but the very sufferings of Christ. Further, the imprecatory psalms—psalms that called for God’s judgment against evil—were no longer cries for vengeance by a hurting and oppressed people but invocations of the very judgment of Christ against the enemies of his coming kingdom. While there is nowadays a certain reluctance to see too many gratuitous references to Christ in a pre-Christian liturgical collection, nevertheless insofar as the Psalms partake of the larger redemptive-historical narrative of Scripture, we are fully justified in seeing in Christ the ultimate fulfillment of the salvation spoken of in these poetic stanzas. Accordingly, in some Christian communities the singing of a psalm is ended with a trinitarian doxology.
The Psalms were, of course, meant to be sung, as they in fact were from ancient times by God’s people. Exactly how they were sung we can only speculate. Psalm 136 was obviously meant to be sung antiphonally, that is, with a cantor singing the first line in each stanza and the assembled congregation responding with “for his steadfast love endures forever.” This is implied by the structure of Hebrew poetry, which proceeds, not according to the strict rhyme and metre familiar especially to Protestant Christians, but by means of parallelism and repeated stresses in the parallel lines. The ancient Hebrew psalmists delighted in repeating a thought twice, but in different words. And contrary to the strict metrical structure of modern Christian hymnody, that of the Hebrew psalms is much closer to the “sprung rhythm” of our children’s nursery rhymes in that, while the basic rhythm is repeated in successive lines or groups of lines, the number of syllables varies from one line to the next. A recent attempt to recover something of this original poetic flavor can be seen in Gelineau psalmody, originated in the 1950s by the French priest Father Joseph Gelineau, for the French-language Bible de Jérusalem.
In many Christian traditions the singing of psalms has been eclipsed by hymns of more recent vintage. This is a phenomenon common to Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the various forms of Protestantism. All the same, many of the church’s most famous hymn writers, such as Martin Luther and Isaac Watts, turned their efforts to the versification of the biblical Psalter. The former’s “A Mighty Fortress” is a christological rendition of Psalm 46. The latter’s “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” is a free paraphrase of Psalm 90. Yet many churches today go through an entire Sunday worship service without singing even a single psalm. Thankfully, this is being rectified in most traditions, as psalmody is increasingly reincorporated into the liturgies of Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, and other churches. Many of these have opted for metrical versifications of the psalms. Moreover, there are still a few churches, such as the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America and the Free Reformed Churches of North America, which, as a matter of principle, sing only the psalms in the liturgy.
The Genevan Psalter
The Genevan Psalter was a project that began in the late 1530s as part of an effort to make available to the newly reformed congregations a way to sing the biblical psalms, initially in Strasbourg and later in Geneva. How were they to be sung? Up to that point the western church had chanted the psalms in Latin according to the method ascribed to Pope Gregory I the Great (c. 540–604). The chanting of psalms in course over a specified period had developed in the monasteries under the influence of the Rule of St. Benedict, shaping into what is known as the Daily Office. Rooted in ancient usage (see, for example, Ps. 119:164 and Dan. 6:10), the Daily Office consists of regular prayer offices said or sung throughout the day at approximately three-hour intervals (cf. Acts 10:9). In the Orthodox Church the Psalter is divided into twenty kathismata, or sittings, during which the entire Psalter is sung in course.
The Daily Office survived the Reformation in some places, but not everywhere. In England the Book of Common Prayer combined the two offices of Matins and Lauds into Morning Prayer and joined Vespers and Compline to form Evening Prayer, or, in its choral form, Evensong. In the Lutheran tradition, where there was an attempt to incorporate monastic piety into the daily lives of ordinary Christians, the Daily Office continues to survive in some fashion. However, it did not continue in those places influenced by such non-Lutheran reformers as Zwingli and Calvin. Nevertheless, the singing of the psalms was retained, to be incorporated into the ordinary Lord’s Day worship service.
What would eventually become the Genevan Psalter began in Strasbourg when Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant were published in 1539 at John Calvin’s direction during his sojourn in that city. This small collection contained nineteen metrical psalms, thirteen of which were set to verse by the French court poet Clément Marot and six others by Calvin himself, as well as three canticles from elsewhere in Scripture, namely, the Decalogue, the Song of Simeon (Nunc Dimittis), and the Creed, thereby making a total of twenty-two texts used by the French-speaking congregation there. These psalms were not sung as plainchant; rather the texts were reworked into poetic form to be sung in the language of the people set to fresh tunes composed explicitly for this purpose by Matthias Greiter (c. 1495–1550) (Ps. 36/68), Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510–1560), and a certain Maistre Pierre. Because the tunes were fresh compositions and thus not familiar to the people, Calvin urged that they be taught first to the children, who would then teach them to the rest of the congregation.
In these early partial collections of psalms, including Aulcuns pseaulmes, La forme des prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques (1542), and Cinquante psaumes en François (1543), the number of psalms increased with each subsequent edition. This meant that some psalms were versified before others. John Witvliet takes note of the relative absence of the psalms of praise with which we ourselves would likely begin if we were to undertake a similar project. Instead, the first psalms to be sung at Strasbourg included those emphasizing confession and forgiveness, wisdom/law, and protection from foes. Witvliet concludes that “Genevan spirituality was formed primarily by psalms of penitence and lament.”1 Moreover, as it turns out, if the Daily Office proper was not exactly retained in its traditional form at Geneva, Strasbourg, and elsewhere, the discipline of congregational psalm singing was not altogether dissimilar to that practiced in Benedictine monasticism.
The completed psalter was published in 1562. The Genevan Psalter would come to exert a considerable influence on the liturgical life of Reformed churches elsewhere as well. A Reformed minister in the Low Countries, Petrus Dathenus (Pieter Datheen, 1531–1588), in addition to translating the Heidelberg Catechism, versified the psalms in the Dutch language only four years after their publication in French. Thereafter his rhymed psalms became the dominant liturgical psalter until a new, Enlightenment-influenced version was introduced in 1773 by the States General of the United Netherlands. The popularity of this version was not hindered by its having been translated directly from Marot’s and Théodore de Bèze’s French text rather than from the Hebrew. To this day some thirty Reformed congregations in the province of Zeeland hold fast to Dathenus’s version.
Not quite a dozen years after the publication of the Genevan Psalter, the legal scholar Ambrosius Lobwasser (1515–1585), who had heard the psalms sung by the Huguenots during his sojourn in the Berry region of France, published a German translation primarily for private use directly from the French text, something for which he was roundly criticized by his fellow Lutherans. The Lobwasser Psalter was published in 1573 and would eventually find its way into the public worship of the Reformed churches in, for example, Zürich. The Lobwasser Psalter would in turn serve as the model for Czech and Hungarian versifications of the Genevan Psalms.
Jiří Strejc (also known as Georg Vetter, 1536–1599) was born in the Moravian village of Zábřeh and became a minister in the Unity of the Brethren, also variously known as the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian Brethren, and Moravian Brethren, who were heirs of the pre-Reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415). Strejc spent some time in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where Lobwasser was teaching. Whether the two met I have been unable to determine, but Strejc was sufficiently impressed with the Lobwasser Psalter that he undertook to translate the German text directly into the Czech language in 1587. It was still being used as recently as the turn of the twentieth century.
The Calvinist Reformation spread also into Hungary, especially the eastern parts of that country under Ottoman Turkish control and thus exempt from the Habsburg-enforced Counter-Reformation. Shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, the widely-traveled Reformed pastor Albert Szenci Molnár published his own translation of the Lobwasser Psalter to be sung to the Genevan tunes. Molnár’s psalms would come, along with Gáspár Károly’s 1590 translation of the Bible, to influence the development of the Hungarian literary language.
Perhaps the most surprising development of all was the seventeenth-century translation of several Genevan psalms into Turkish, the language of a predominantly Muslim country. Wojciech Bobowski (1610–1675) was a musically gifted Polish-born Reformed Christian who had the misfortune to be kidnapped as a young man by Tatars and sold as a slave to the Ottoman sultan.
However, what began in slavery turned out, as with the biblical Joseph, to be very nearly a smart career move. He became translator, treasurer, and court composer for the sultan, converting (at least nominally) to Islam and changing his name to Ali Ufki. Among his many impressive achievements, he translated the Bible into Turkish and versified the first fourteen psalms in that language, enabling them to be sung to their proper Genevan melodies. This small collection was published in 1665.
Since then the Genevan psalms have been translated into Portuguese, Indonesian, Korean, and even Japanese, thereby demonstrating their durability over many centuries and in different cultures. There are many ways to sing the psalms, including Anglican, Gregorian, and Byzantine chant, as well as the Scottish and similar metrical psalters. The Genevan Psalter deserves an honored place among these other forms and deserves to be better known, especially in the English-speaking world. The Genevan Psalter is testimony to the love Reformed Christians have had for singing the Psalms since the time of Calvin. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord” (Ps. 150:6, English Standard Version)!
1. John Witvliet, “The Spirituality of the Psalter in Calvin’s Geneva,” in Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows into Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 208 n. 22.
David T. Koyzis (PhD, Notre Dame) is a Global Scholar with Global Scholars Canada and is the author of Political Visions and Illusions (2019) and We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God (2014). In 2020 he completed a decades-old project to set the Psalms to English verse according to their Genevan melodies. This article is adapted with permission from his web project on the Psalms: https://genevanpsalter.blogspot. com/.